2nd-3rd June: Days 55-56
We bade farewell to the Badlands after a slow-motion pack up. Very hot again today. 90 degrees by 11am, and 95 by mid afternoon.
Today we headed to the northern edge of South Dakota where it meets North Dakota and had no booked site for the night. Our destination was Lemmon, a small town surrounded by nothing. We were fairly sure it had a small RV park in town, but we could only find one mention of it on a 7 year old forum post. Fortune favours the brave, so we headed off.
To say that the roads are straight here is an understatement. We drove approx 200 miles and only encountered 6 or 7 corners all day. Our route took us through rolling prairies and we saw almost no-one, just a few truckers going the other way. All waved. Not sure if this was just ‘the country way’ or if we were a particularly unusual sight. We are really off the standard tourist route now and there were no other RVs to be seen. We have no 3G, barely have cell reception, and are paying close attention to our range and the distance between petrol stations. Big D needs feeding on quite a regular schedule.
We arrived in Lemmon mid-afternoon, to the darkening skies of a summer thunder storm, and no idea where the RV park may be. (Having neither Google maps or a paper map of town. Like original explorers of sorts.)
After a few laps of town, which didn’t take long, we found it. Hmmm. A more realistic description would be a ‘small area of scrubland between the Napa auto parts shop and the aggregate yard with 5 or 6 RV hook ups’. There were unusable toilets in a shed, overflowing bins, and an honesty box for the fee. But we are brave, remember. We gritted our teeth, found the only hook-up site with the functioning power and water, set up camp, and then realised that it was fine. We had the place to ourselves (unsurprisingly) and it was a stones throw from the main street of town.
Now Lemmon is a moderately interesting place. Our hook for heading this way was another entry in the Atlas Obscura. The Petrified Wood Park. In the centre of town is a crazy sculpture garden made entirely from chunks of petrified wood. This was the idea of chap called O.S. Quammen. He was so interested in these local fossils that he personally designed the park as a showcase for them and employed 30-40 unemployed men from the town to build it in the early 30s.
Just south of Lemmon is the area where a local man Hugh Glass had his adventures with a bear. This was the true story behind the Leo DeCaprio movie The Revenant. This area also has lots of dinosaur fossils, most notably ‘Sue’. This is the most complete T-Rex skeleton ever found and is now on display in a museum in Illinois.
The town also has a rather strange museum which showcases lots of other dinosaur fossil finds from the area including the large part of a triceratops skeleton. There is significant space given over to a Creationist Theory explanation for the fossils, citing a catastrophic flood and a scale model of the Noah’s Ark.
We are definitely in middle America and not just geographically.
Another amusing fact about Lemon relates to alcohol. Originally the town spanned the border between North and South Dakota, the border being the railway line that ran east to west. North Dakota was a dry state and South Dakota was not, so you could only drink alcohol south of the railway tracks. Needless to say the southern half of town prospered and there is no Lemmon in North Dakota any more.